St Michael the Archangel
by PerfectDisaster22
Summary: Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do thou, oh Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God cast into Hell Satan and all evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.


**Author's Note** : I have no idea where this came from. But it welled up from somewhere in the void, and it refused to leave me alone until I sat down to write it. Most of it happened in one frenzied night where I could barely keep up with the words pouring through my fingers.

This may be the most thematic, surreal thing I have ever written. Timeline is pretty much all over the place, from Steve first waking up until a couple of years after AoU. It's compliant through AoU, including AoS through season two, for what it's worth, but timeline really doesn't matter very much here.

* * *

… _cast into Hell Satan and all evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls._

Once upon a time, Steve thought he'd known everything there was to know about Bucky.

Hadn't they grown up together, had each others' backs since they were children, lived in each others' pockets past childhood and into adulthood? Hadn't they fought together, bled together, died together? The only thing they hadn't done was wake up together… [Oh God, ow. Fuck. That thought still hurt, all these months later. Shut it up, shut it away, _ow ow fucking ow oh God why did you leave me where did you fly away and why couldn't you carry me with you?_ ]

Steve knew everything; all the trivia and minutiae. He knew Bucky's favorite food [pancakes], his favorite music [anything he could dance to], his childhood fears [Father Mahoney's glare, being looked down upon for being the son of immigrants, and ironically, blood] and the terrors of adulthood [blood, losing his soul, the memories of Azzano]. He knew the exact shade of stormy blue Bucky's eyes turned when he was angry, and the exact cadence and pitch and timbre of his real, everything's-right-with-the-world laugh. There was no part of James Buchanan Barnes with which Steve wasn't intimately familiar.

Or so he had thought.

Tony called him a masochist for watching the documentaries about himself and his Howlies. Even Sam had questioned why Steve would torment himself with the ghosts of the past; was he _trying_ to punish himself for still being alive when all the others were gone?

But it really wasn't like that, honest. It was just… Steve had his memories, right? _His_. And he knew them inside and out and upside down, backwards and forwards. But when he watched the documentaries, listened to the inverviews of his friends and brothers-in-arms, family and those left behind… Those were _other_ memories. _New_ memories. Shades and details that perhaps Steve had forgotten, or maybe had never known at all. And Steve, he was selfish and greedy, a glutton always reaching for more; he wanted every last scrap of every memory he could find. After all, memories were all he had left.

He stared at Dum Dum's face on the screen, greedily devouring all the details and differences between the man he remembered and the one preserved on film. He ached that he'd never gotten to know this older, more somber man; he was desperately grateful that Dum Dum had _lived_ , that he'd had the chance to grow, that there were people who remembered him and cherished that memory.

"We got to know each other pretty well, in that cage," Dum Dum was saying, his eyes unfocused – or maybe focused on something only he could see. "The Nazis worked us hard during the day, but at night it was only us. Sleep was hard to come by; most times, all there was to do was talk to each other."

This one wasn't a documentary for public consumption; there were too many classified secrets, too many specific stories and details, things too dark for the general public to be exposed to. Tony had told him it was in the SHIELD file dump; some long-forgotten internal fact gathering, probably. Steve preferred it to the public documentaries. He wanted the details, needed the classified, painful details he had never heard. They were the most real bits.

The Howlies had never talked about Azzano. At least, not when Steve was in earshot. And maybe that was right; Steve had been the one to rescue them, but he hadn't _been_ there. He could never truly understand what they had lived through, in those days and weeks before their miraculous rescue. But the truth was, they had been a team long before Steve recruited them to become a special operations unit for the SSR; their bonds had been forged in the fires of the munitions factory and in the cold, dank cages.

Onscreen, Dum Dum was stroking his moustache, sprinkled with gray that matched his temples, shaking his head. "Most of us, we only had the energy to get to know the other men in our own cages. Even that was hard enough; between the sickness, the starvation, and the experimentation, men were dropping left and right, and it was a fair bet that you'd lose half the men in your cage by the end of the week." He shook his head, smiling faintly as his eyes refocused on the interviewer. "Barnes, though. That mad bastard learned all their names. Everyone. In every cage. There were four hundred prisoners at that plant, son. And Barnes knew 'em all."

Dum Dum was quiet for a long minute, swallowing hard as he blinked suspiciously shiny eyes. He cleared his throat, shaking his head again, in disbelief.

"He did the same thing, when we were in Africa," he said quietly. "Knew all the men in our squadron, remembered the name of every man we lost. I told him once, that was no way to get through a war. You can't carry the dead with you, I told him. That much weight on your back, it'll kill you long before the Krauts do. You know what he told me?"

Dum Dum looked up, and the burning conviction in his eyes was a punch in Steve's gut. God, how many times had he seen that fire in Bucky's eyes?

"He said if we didn't carry the dead, if we didn't remember their names, no one would. That God might forget us and St. Michael might not carry us home, so we would. So _he_ would," Dugan recounted. "He said we couldn't keep 'em alive, we couldn't bring their bodies home to bury, but by God we could be strong enough to carry their names. We could keep that much alive. He was strong enough to carry that much, he said."

Steve exhaled, a long, low keening leaving his gut as he bent his head and shed tears in time with Dum Dum.

* * *

There are names in the Soldier's memory.

There is _The Name_ , of course. _The Name_ caused the first crack in the Soldier's programming, the first fracture that led to his fall [dive] into the river to save the Mission [ _The Name_ ; his death; his rebirth; his redemption]. There are names that are shadows, whispers in the dark; names that might be memories, if he were a thing that had memories. Zola and Handler and Pierce; Hydra and Red Room and Leviathan; Germany, Russia, America; Natalia [ _my Talia; solnishka moya_ ]. There are the names [lies; shadows] that supposedly belong to the Soldier [soldiers own nothing, not even their own selves] – Asset, Winter Soldier, Death, Weapon, Yasha, James Buchanan Bar- [no. Not that one. Not yet; maybe never.]

But there are other names; names for which the Soldier has no context.

 _Herbert. Adam. Nick. Ian. Lucas. John. Christopher._

Endless names; or perhaps many names on an endless loop, some forgotten mantra that has lost all meaning.

 _Charles. Tommy. Hugh. Cary. Ryan. William. Joshua._

They are not the names of targets, of missions, of confirmed kills and acceptable losses; they are not the names of enemies or allies or comrades or students.

 _Manfred. Bob. Simon. Gary. Gregory. Allen. Eugene._

They are no one and nothing.

 _James. Raphael. Barney. Jacob. Martin. John. Fred._

They are a secondary pulse beneath his skin. They are the fibers of his muscles, the bonding element in his blood. They are bones and guts and connective tissues.

 _Cliff. Frank. Daniel. Sam. Edward. George. Patrick._

They are ghosts. Phantoms, like his left arm [was it always metal? Didn't he once have flesh and blood?]. They are silent whispers. An itch in the back of his mind; something, like _The Name_ , that should not have been forgotten.

 _Jesse. Thomas. Andrew. Grant. Anthony. Joseph. Leo._

They are precious; they are _his_. They were _taken_ and they should not have been; they should not have been _lost_ -

 _Neil. Benjamin. Eric. Louis. Robert. Stephen. Matthew._

They are rage. They are fury and steel and fire, thrumming through the Soldier's blood, screaming in his fractured mind, fueling his own rage and driving him forward.

 _Christian. Eugene. Mark. Carl. Henry. Felix. Kelley._

They are everything.

The Soldier carries hundreds of men's rage in his blood. This is alright; he is strong enough to carry them.

From the neverending litany, the Soldier chooses a name. A name that feels _right_ in a way precious few things ever have [ _right_ like the feel of a gun in his hand, _right_ like the taste of diner pancakes, _right_ like the whisper of _The Name_ ]. A name that might have been his, once; or perhaps it is only his now. Either way, the Soldier takes it, embraces it, makes it his.

 _Michael_.

He will be Michael. And he will carry the other names.

* * *

… _and do thou, oh Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God…_

After Steve fell, his and Bucky's few possessions were boxed up by Howard – or, more accurately, Howard's people – and put into SSR storage. It was done on Peggy's orders. Captain America had already been surrendered to the public; they would not have Steve Rogers, too.

When Steve rose, Director Fury offered the boxes back. He had refused, then; the past was too near, the pain and loss too fresh. He was already drowning in this brave new world; the reminders of a world so recently [long] gone would only be an anchor tied to his ankles and could only drag him back under.

When SHIELD fell, when Bucky rose screaming from the grave, Steve asked Director Coulson for the boxes. Bucky was gone, ghosted into the wind and shadows, but he was _alive_. And maybe [probably] he would evade Steve, but he had to try, he had to _try_ to bring him in from the cold; hadn't they both been cold for far too long? And maybe the physical possessions of lifetimes ago wouldn't help Bucky remember who he was or who Steve was or what they had been, but if Steve was going to try he would use every tool in his arsenal.

It was all there; _everything_. Clothing yellowed and fragile with age; shirts that would never fit again, pants chewed to pieces by moths, an old cardigan that made Steve fall to his knees because it still smelled like cologne and tobacco and felt like home [it had been Bucky's favorite, he'd worn it all the time, but when the winters got bad he shed it without a word and wrapped it around Steve's rail-thin shoulders _because you need it more than I do, Stevie; gotta weight you down on this earth somehow, pal, St. Michael can't fly you off just yet_ ]. Old sketchbooks, filled with hasty line sketches of people they'd passed on the streets, landscapes of vistas that no longer existed, page after page after page of Bucky's hands, his dancing feet, the long line of his neck as he threw his head back and _laughed_ …

At the very bottom of one of the boxes was a plain wooden box. Steve felt it before he saw it, his fingers brushing against the worn, smooth wood. His breath caught in his throat; he'd recognize that box anywhere.

Sarah Rogers hadn't brought much with her across the ocean when she fled Dublin in the wake of the Easter Rebellion. Her carpetbag carried only two dresses [in addition to the three she'd worn], an extra pair of shoes, what little money she'd saved, a wedding ring she'd bought from a pawn shop, a battered Bible, a thin volume of poetry by Yeats, another by Wilde, and a small wooden box her da had carved to hold her ma's glass bead rosary.

Years later, when Sarah handed her bedridden son the rosary in preparation for his First Communion, she'd told him it belonged to his father. She told him that Joseph had been a deeply religious man, that when he'd gone off to war he'd left the rosary for the child he just knew he'd left in Sarah's belly; a chain binding one Rogers man to another. A true enough story; Sarah's da Joseph _was_ a very religious man, and her ma Catherine had always said that rosaries _were_ the chains that bound loving families together.

Years after that, when Steve and Bucky shared an apartment, Sarah's wooden box had rested in a place of honor on their one rickety bookshelf. It had carried both Steve's glass bead rosary and Bucky's rosewood one. Bucky had liked that, the thought that they each brought the chains of their own families together within Sarah's loving embrace.

Bucky hadn't taken his rosary when he shipped off for basic. He'd said that war was no proper place for something as sacred as family. When he was gone, Steve had started praying with Bucky's rosary, staring up at the stained glass window of St. Michael slaying Lucifer as he worried the beads. It felt blasphemous to Steve; sacreligious and just plain unlucky for Bucky to be without the chains of family. But every time Bucky got home for leave, Steve would offer the rosary, and Bucky would refuse. "Keep it safe for me," he'd said.

When it was Steve's turn to ship off, he had left the two rosaries safely jumbled together in the wooden box. A hope for good luck, maybe; half prayer, half magic spell that if Steve left the rosaries undisturbed, they would both come home again.

Seventy years and lifetimes later, Steve took a deep breath and finally reopened the box, reaching a trembling finger inside to stroke the rosewood beads.

* * *

Once upon a time, James Buchanan Barnes had been Catholic.

This is one of the facts that is slowly coming back to Michael about a person he had once [maybe] been. Contrary to popular mythology, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes had not met in a back alley of Vinegar Hill after Barnes rushed in to save Rogers from bullies three times his size. That had come afterwards. No, James and Steven had met in the vestibule of St. Ann Church, ten minutes before Sunday morning Mass. Steve had been coughing, caught in the tail end of a spring cold, and Bucky had frowned at him.

"You gonna live through Mass, pal?" he'd asked.

Steve had scowled, righteous indignation in every stick-thin limb. "Shove off, jerk."

Bucky might have started a ruckus, but Father Mahoney was _right there_ , his bushy eyebrows already starting to swoop downwards in disapproval. So he'd held his tongue, focusing on hefting up the heavy censer, already warm from the burning incense [and if the heavy, sweet smoke made Steve cough some more, well… not his fault the little guy was a punk].

Friendship had come after a back alley brawl against the Flannagan brothers. After that, back alley brawls had become a sort of Mass all their own; Stevie the suffering Messiah shedding his blood for the sins of the world, and Bucky the avenging angel diving in to fight for the center of his universe.

Michael could not say why his former self had retained his Catholicism until his death. From his [admittedly uninformed] observations, most people shed religion, much as they shed the belief in Santa Claus or the boogeyman [that last was foolish. He _was_ the boogeyman.]. What had Bucky Barnes found to believe in? How could he have retained belief in a God when Steve Rogers, the center of his universe, kept flirting with Death? When time and again they were left without money, heat, food, work? And yet, through every single challenge and obstacle, Barnes had reached for a rosary, had knelt in a church pew, had whispered prayers to an invisible, possibly imaginary, figure up in the clouds who was undoubtedly too far away to even notice two boys from Brooklyn, let alone offer them aid personally.

Perhaps it was a habit, an ingrained routine, like the way Michael surveilled his surroundings for threats and meticulously cleaned his three guns, garotte, and six knives regardless of whether he'd used them that day. Maybe it was bargaining, a way to hold the balance; _I say three Hail Marys and You give him three more breaths. I stay on my knees for an hour and You make sure he holds on for one more hour, till the doctor can get here._ Maybe it was a way to drown out the fear, to push out everything but the strong, fierce conviction that he was going to _live, Goddamnit, You are not going to take him away from me, not now not ever_ …

Bucky Barnes had left his rosary behind when he went away to war; perhaps that was his attempt to leave religion behind, too. And perhaps it worked, for a while.

Until the cold, the cage, the dark; until the grim parade of horrors the Smithsonian had called _Azzano_.

The history books always mentioned Captain America's heroic one-man rescue of the 107th Division from the Nazi labor camp in Azzano, Italy. They did not mention the aftermath; there was nothing in the carefully edited propaganda that was the Captain America legend to stir memories of sitting in the Captain's tent, miles away from the enemy but still unsafe, still exposed, still dangerous. Still strapped to that damn table, still feeling the acid slide of chemicals in his veins, still lost and unmoored.

The Captain – god, how could this gilded godlike figure be Steve? But it was, it _was_ him, this was who he had always been inside the uncooperative body – had frowned, his blue eyes cloudy with concern and uncertainty.

"Buck?" he'd asked, unusually hesitant. "You… You doin' alright?"

"Yeah," Bucky had muttered, running anxious fingers through his hair. "Find me a rosary, would you?"

Steve blinked, just as taken aback as Bucky. That plea had come from nowhere; it had been pulled from the deepest depths of his soul.

"Yeah, o'course," Steve had nodded, relieved to finally have a concrete task, something he could definitely fix. "Let me go find Father Malone, I'll be back in a bit."

Steve had returned, of course. Steve _always_ returned; a suffering Messiah, always coming back to save him. He had returned, and silently pressed a rosary into Bucky's hand. It had not been the correct rosary, Michael thinks – remembers? There had been another rosary, once; smooth wood and delicate links and the steel chains of family winding through his heart and binding him to a wooden box and glass beads and Steve. This was not the correct rosary, but that was alright; Bucky hadn't whispered the correct prayers, anyways. Once it had been Our Fathers and Hail Marys and Glory Be. But that was a rosary for home, and this was war. In this war, the only prayer Bucky could offer was a litany of names.

He had kept the rosary when the Howling Commandoes took to the field. He had not prayed nightly. But often, when the nightmares came. He would wake up, walk away from the warm glow of the campfire. He would step into the shadows [where he belonged, even then], wrap the beads around his fingers, and he would whisper the last prayer he had left.

He wasn't Steve; he was no suffering Messiah, bleeding for the sins of the world. But he could be strong enough to make this prayer; strong enough to carry the dead to Heaven.

* * *

 _May God rebuke him, we humbly pray…_

It's kind of funny, Steve thinks, the parts of him that are and are not known.

He is Captain America. The Star Spangled Man with a Plan. The Living Legend, the Sentinel of Liberty, God's Righteous Man.

He is Steve Rogers. The Man Out of Time. The Old Man, the First Avenger, the Capsicle.

He is a shining beacon of freedom, the embodiment of the best of America's values. He is a soldier, a hero, a myth and a legend.

He is a poor boy who made good; a sickly man given a second chance at life. He is a selfless friend and a humble brother, a sensitive artist who didn't want to kill but who hated bullies.

It's funny, the parts that the mythology glossed over.

Like the fact that he was the physically disabled son of a dirt poor immigrant single mother. Like the fact that he grew up surrounded by homosexuals and drag queens and gay bars down by the Navy docks, and he didn't walk out of that environment untouched [or "untouched," for that matter]. Like the fact that he was Catholic.

In light of all the other discriminations – for being poor, an immigrant's son [a dirty mick], a eugenicist's worst nightmare – perhaps he simply didn't notice religious discrimination. But in a country of WASPs, to be Catholic was just one more black mark on his record, and that had made its way into his mythology.

Captain America was nondenominationally Christian, to be sure. Steve Rogers was "a man of great faith and conviction."

Steven Grant Luke Rogers was staunchly and proudly Catholic, thank you very much.

His Confirmation name was apparently simultaneously surprising and perfectly fitting to the scholars who understood what that meant, what weight a Confirmation name carried. Apparently, most historians who researched his religious history had expected to find that he'd taken his father's name as a Confirmation name.

Little did they [or Steve] know that Sarah Rogers had already given her son his father's name. Steven for her grandfather; Grant after his father.

Anyhow, Steve had suggested the name Joseph when he was preparing for his Confirmation. And Sarah had wrinkled her nose and chased that idea right out of his head.

"First and middle names are given to honor family, Stevie," she'd said, shaking her head. "But your Confirmation name… that you choose because of who you want to be. What you want to be. Joseph was a good man, my boy, but you're already honoring him by being a good man yourself. In your wildest dreams, what do you want to be, dear heart?"

"An artist," Steve had bashfully admitted, and Sarah had smiled.

"Here," she said, flipping through the big book of saints he'd borrowed from Father Mahoney. "Saint Luke is the patron saint of artists and physicians."

Captain America was the physician, curing America of her ills and protecting her from illness. [Protecting Bucky from any who would try to take him away again; helping Bucky recover and heal from the untold traumas he'd suffered.]

Steve Rogers was the artist, preserving all that was good and beautiful about the country and the people for whom he fought. [Painting memories for Bucky, reminding him of what was real and true.]

All in all, not a bad thing, to be a Luke.

* * *

There was a dark, fearful legend told in the darkened hallways of HYDRA; a whispered story of the one time the Winter Soldier had slipped off the leash of his masters.

The Asset had been sent to Dallas, Texas in November of 1963. It was the height of the Cold War, and the peak of the Winter Soldier's work. HYDRA's Russian allies had requested the removal of an American president; HYDRA sent Russia's Winter to claim another victim.

Target eliminated. Mission completed.

The HYDRA legend did not say what triggered the Asset's disobedience [sunshine on golden hair; a golden sunshine boy, shining brighter than anyone around him]. The tale said only that the Asset did not report for debriefing and repair. The Asset was a ghost in the wind.

HYDRA sent its tentacles out immediately. Every active agent was put on high alert; immediate promotion was promised to whoever found the Asset and brought it in.

The Asset was found four days later, in a rundown old church in a disreputable neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The Asset was kneeling on the stone floor, staring with anguished eyes at a stained glass window that depicted Saint Michael slaying Lucifer, while without permission the Asset's lips moved in Papist filth.

"St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle," the Asset mumbled in a voice gone hoarse from disuse. "Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray-"

"Asset!" commanded the HYDRA officer in strident tones. "Report!"

"-and do thou, oh Prince of the Heavenly Host," the Asset continued, utterly ignoring the commanding officer, "by the power of God, cast into Hell Satan and all evil spirits-"

"Asset! Soldier!"

"-who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls."

"Report!"

The Asset stood, its back turned to its handlers. "Michael. I am Michael."

The officer strode forward, intending to strike the Asset.

The officer did not make it more than three steps before the Asset shot him.

Four gunshots, four dead HYDRA officers.

Saint Michael stretched out his blood-drenched wings to send the demons back to their master in Hell.

The Asset did not see the fifth officer in the choir loft. The Asset could not stop the tranquilizer dart that pierced his neck and dragged him back to hell.

The Asset did not remember his Confirmation name again for a long, long time.

* * *

 _Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil_.

It was a fairly well known fact that Steve Rogers had been an artist.

Art historians had analyzed his surviving art [aside from a few sketchbooks which Director Carter had ordered never be released, because some things deserved to be kept private] and discerned all sorts of things about him; they had called him a promising talent who might someday have been a great artist, had war not called him away.

Psychologists had pored over his drawings, trying to suss out out he'd felt about war and death and the times in which he lived.

Queer historians had had a field day with the innumerable sketches that were so clearly Bucky Barnes, you didn't need to see his face to know that Steve Rogers had drawn his best friend more than anything or anyone else, and enough of the extant sketches, portraits and figure studies carried subtle or blatantly homoerotic undertones that it seems fair to suppose that Rogers at least subconsciously lusted for his supposedly platonic partner…

[Man, the queer historians had no fucking idea.]

There hadn't really been time to draw after Steve came out of the ice. Or, if he was really honest here, the desire. Drawing hurt too much; it was too tied in with the life he had left behind and the person he wasn't sure he was anymore. Drawing was how Steve expressed himself, and he… he just couldn't, right now.

After SHIELD fell, after he found and lost Bucky again, Steve couldn't stop drawing. There were too many multitudes inside him; he had to bleed some of them out onto paper, or go mad.

Steve had never been particularly interested in drawing religious iconography. Sure, he'd done a few repair jobs for Father Mahoney, and he'd sometimes do icons or funeral cards for the parishioners, but it wasn't necessarily something he enjoyed. How did one contain something as complicated as religion in art?

Then SHIELD fell, rotted from the inside out. Then Bucky rose, a hollow shell of who he had once been.

Steve couldn't sleep after SHIELD's destruction, too haunted by nightmares [ice. cold. a fall. _Bucky! NO!_ ] and memories [a long sleep in ice. unimaginable pain as he watched the rending, the ripping as the other half of his soul was torn away. he had died with Bucky.] and ghosts [a weapon with a dead man's face. a look of dawning horror as something got through the Soldier's programming and found the man lost within. _I'm with you to the end of the line._ ]

After the third night in a row of waking up screaming and covered in cold sweat, Steve began to paint.

Archangel Michael has always been portrayed as a warrior. He always wears his breastplate, carries a shield and a sword, or sometimes a lance. Michael is always shown as active; a study of lightning-fast motion, in the middle of a lethal thrust of his weapon. But Michael is also always shown as pale and luminous, and _blond_. Michael is always lithe and fine-boned; willowy and fey, almost feminine.

The art critics would probably have a field day if they ever saw this painting.

Because how could Steve _ever_ draw his avenging angel in a manner so foreign?

Steve's Michael had thick thighs and strong hands; built like a brick shithouse, strong enough to storm all defenses and carry all his lost souls to Heaven. Steve's Michael was dark-haired and scowling, raining down vengeance on his enemies and promising death to the ones he had not yet reached. Steve's Michael's wings were soot-stained and dripping with blood, and yet they weren't ruined or demonic; his wings were strong, strong as the rest of him, and they were beautiful. Steve's Michael carried a red, white and blue shield in his left arm, a pistol at his side and a sniper rifle at his back. With his right hand he reached back toward a blond-haired, blue-eyed waif [that the kids these days apparently called a "twink"], protecting his tiny charge against the wickedness and snares of a red-skulled devil, a squid with a skull's head and round, wire-framed glasses, and a million soot-black shadows.

When Steve snapped out of the trance he'd fallen into a timeless eternity ago, when brush first touched canvas, he took one look at his creation before falling sideways and passing out in exhaustion.

He did not notice the shadow silently slipping through his window. He didn't wake up, didn't even realize as the shadow scooped him up in strong arms without hesitation, as if he weighed no more than a feather, and tenderly laid him down in his bed, carefully covering him with the patchwork quilt old Mrs. Donovan down the hall had made for him.

The silent shadow turned, noticing the canvas for the first time. He stood there, staring, for a long time. His face was utterly expressionless, and the only person who might have interpreted his thoughts was currently asleep in the bed behind him.

The shadow stared at the angel with his face for a long time before silently slipping out the same window he'd entered.

* * *

Twelve-year-old James Barnes sat at the kitchen table, idly flipping through Father Mahoney's battered old copy of _Lives of the Saints_ while his mother cleaned up after dinner.

"I dunno, Ma," James said thoughfully, his brow furrowing as he perused the many, many saints he had to choose from. "What about Michael?"

Winnifred paused in her labors, turning to face her eldest and her only son. "That's a strong name, my Iacov, but are you sure?"

James sat up straighter, his frown deepening in confusion. This must be a truly serious conversation, if his mother was calling him by his Romanian name. Normally, Winnifred and George insisted on Americanizing their four children entirely, but every once in a while a very serious moment would call for the language and culture they had left behind a year before the birth of their first child.

"Why wouldn't I be, Mamă?" he asked, matching her shift into the Old Country. "Michael's a soldier! He gets to carry a sword. That's pretty keen."

Winnifred couldn't help but laugh to herself as she carefully dried her hands on a dish towel and pulled out the chair to sit beside her son.

"Do you know why Sfântul Mihail is the patron saint of soldiers, Iacov?" Winnifred asked, smiling as James shook his head. "It is because his arms are strong enough to carry everyone who calls on him. Because his wings are large enough to carry them all to Heaven. If you take his name, my son, you are pledging to God and the world that you will do the same. It is a heavy burden, my son, and a great and terrible privilege. It is not the sort of work you should take up lightly."

"But he'd help me, wouldn't he?" James asked, tilting his head. "If I was takin' his name and his job, wouldn't he give a fella a hand?"

Winnifred smiled, brushing back her son's dark hair to kiss his forehead. "Yes, my son. I think he would."

Three weeks later, James Buchanan Michael Barnes was Confirmed.

And the woman who had once been Miruna gripped her rosewood rosary beads tightly, praying that Sfântul Mihail's burden would not fall on the shoulders of her boy. Her Iacov Bogdan [now Mihail] Bărnuţiu.

* * *

 _St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle._

It took a long time to bring Bucky in from the cold.

Month after month of fruitless searching, where Steve never caught a glimpse of his best friend. The closest he ever got was running across the remains of HYDRA bases whose embers still glowed with the last of their warmth. But there was no sighting or snatch of rumor about the Soldier; no discernable pattern to his movements or hints as to where he was going next.

In the end, Steve didn't find Bucky; Bucky came to Steve. He walked right up to the front door of the upstate Avengers complex, dropped all his weapons, held his hands up, and surrendered.

It hadn't been Bucky, at first. He had been thoroughly examined by scientists and doctors for killswitches and deep triggers. With no HYDRA to wipe and freeze him, the knockoff serum in his veins had a chance to repair the brain damage. Not all of it; there was some permanent damage to his temporal and frontal lobes, impairing his facial recognition and emotional processing abilities. He was withdrawn and wary with any faces he didn't remember, and it took a few weeks for any new faces to stick in his memory. So the number of people authorized to deal with him was kept as low as possible, and all other personnel were forbidden access to him.

When he first came in, little to none of Bucky's personality had manifested. Stark had taken a look at the Soldier's file [that had been a very long, booze- and curse-filled evening that Pepper _never_ wanted to relive] and said that from what he could tell by the schematics of the Chair, Bucky's frontal lobe had taken the most brutal of the electroshock sessions – which made sense, if HYDRA were trying to create a blank slate, mindless killing machine. In consequence, there was virtually nothing about this man that indicated that he was the same Bucky Barnes that Steve had known. So when he requested to be called Michael, nobody had argued. Even Steve had gone along with Michael's wishes, even if he said the name with a pained twist of his lips [was it a good sign that Bucky had chosen his Confirmation name?].

As weeks turned to months and Michael's brain had the chance to heal, bits and pieces of his former life began to resurface. He knew Steve, he always had, but now he began to _remember_. He wasn't just an Asset, a weapon; he had been a human, a man with a history and a family and experiences and memories.

It was hard; fucking daunting to try to rectify Bucky's memories with the Asset's missions. Because those came back, too, with perfect clarity. The Soldier had never been given context for his targets; who bothers to explain to their gun why they need it to shoot? And so asking Michael to recall names was useless. Instead, Maria Hill would show him case files; locations, methods, faces. If given a face to trigger him, Michael could recall every detail of the mission with perfect clarity.

 _Target acquired. 36 hour window. Method: sniper. Method: bomb. Method: close quarters. Secondary target. Acceptable collateral. Target eliminated. Target eliminated. Target eliminated._

As he revealed the details of each of his many kills, Michael would only ask Hill one question.

"What were their names?"

The first time Steve [standing behind the two-way window, watching the debrief session as he always did despite everyone telling him it wasn't necessary or healthy] heard Michael ask that question, he inhaled sharply, his eyes filling with tears.

It was the clearest sign he'd seen yet that Bucky was still in there, that he wasn't entirely gone.

Of course, of _course_ he would ask what their names were.

At Steve's insistence, Michael wasn't treated like a prisoner. He was allowed free access around the base, and he was only surveilled as much as the other personnel on site. As more and more details of his time with HYDRA were revealed, New SHIELD came to agree with Steve's assessment. The Winter Soldier had not been acting of his own volition; he had been a prisoner of war, a subhuman _thing_ tortured into compliance.

And slowly, as his memories returned and his brain began to stabilize, Michael – now sometimes called Barnes – began to prove himself to the other people on base. As of right now, he had no interest in returning to the field, but he took a job as a security consultant, and had [in Stark's words] way too much fucking fun testing the security of each SHIELD and Avengers base, revealing their weak spots [too many] and suggesting improvements. When he ran out of those, Stark borrowed him to test the various SI warehouses and facilities.

Barnes' return to the field happened a year after he came in from the cold. The team was taking out a base in Russia – one that Barnes and Natasha knew very well. He had been reluctant to pick up a gun again, but it hadn't sat well with him to let Steve and Natalia handle this one on their own.

And it was a damn good thing he was there, because goddamn if Stevie wasn't just as reckless and fucking goddamn _stupid_ in this strange third life of theirs. Dumbass.

He had meant to stay safe and unseen in his nest, providing cover and being their eyes. But then Steve, the reckless fucking dumbass, had bitten off more than he could chew. And if there was one thing Barnes knew in the depths of his soul, it was that it was his job to save Steve from his own stupidity.

And so the Soldier had risen like Russia's winter winds, swept into the base, and spread his bloody wings to rescue his charges from the Hell into which they'd thrown themselves.

This time, he didn't ask for their names. Evil men didn't get to be remembered or saved.

Michael knew that his decision to join the fray had made SHIELD nervous, that they feared what might happen if the Soldier came out to play. Barnes wished it was that easy; he wished the Soldier were an entire other consciousness who roamed freely through his head. But it didn't work like that. The Soldier wasn't his own person; he _was_ the Soldier. Sometimes, Barnes couldn't tell if the Soldier was the true core of who he was underneath the veneer of humanity and personality, or if the Soldier was like a slightly different radio station, a different frequency he could tune into. Either way, Michael couldn't pretend that the Soldier was like HYDRA, a foreign entity controlling what he did. He knew it was himself making decisions and reacting; he knew what he was doing as he swept through the base and killed everyone in his path. He wished he could separate himself from the Soldier, wished there was a dark, hidden corner of his psyche untouched by the Soldier. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and as Sam said, there was no good in wishing for what would never be.

When they got back to the base, Barnes gave Stark a call. He'd sustained some damage to his left arm during the rescue [fucking EMPs], and while the arm was still partially functional, his fine motor control was shot.

For all his… _Stark_ -ness… Tony really was very good with Bucky's arm. He was teaching Bucky how the inner circuitry worked, so that Bucky could make some basic repairs on his own, and he was looking into a possible redesign or upgrade of the technology to make the arm lighter, though Tony warned that that would either have to be a piece-by-piece fix or Barnes would have to go under for serious surgery, because of the way the arm had been grafted onto his body. [In Tony's words, "Whoever did this was a genius with mechanical engineering, but they were absolute shit with biology."]

Still, even with all that, Tony took care to never make Bucky stay in the lab terribly long. So the fact that they'd been MIA for four hours already? You'll forgive Steve for being a little worried about them.

He'd just made up his mind to go find them when Bucky walked into their apartment. He looked tired, but not as haunted as being in the labs usually made him, so that was good, right?

"You okay, Buck?" Steve asked carefully.

Bucky nodded, before twitching his right shoulder irritably. "Do me a favor?"

"Of course," Steve nodded, folding down the corner of his book and setting it down.

Bucky nodded, tossing Steve a tube of aloe vera. "Rub this on my arm for me? Stark went apoplectic when I said I could do it myself. Something about the gel gumming up the sensors in my fingers."

Steve furrowed his brows in confusion until Bucky reached up and pulled his t-shirt over his head, turning so Steve could see.

He couldn't help but gasp at the fucking _beautiful_ design. An angel wing, in stark black ink, flowing from his shoulderblade and down his arm.

"Buck…" Steve whispered.

Bucky ducked his head, sitting in front of Steve so he could apply the aloe to Bucky's quickly healing skin. Close up, Steve could see that Bucky's metal arm had been etched in an identical fashion. Squinting, Steve studied the graceful lines, before he realized that they weren't lines. They were _names_.

"Michael…" Steve murmured, tracing the dozens, hundreds of names Bucky had etched into his flesh.

Bucky shook his head, reaching a hesitant hand out to stroke the smooth wooden box Steve kept on the coffee table.. "M'no angel, Steve."

"But you're strong enough to carry their names," Steve finished quietly.

A short pause, and then Bucky nodded. Steve nodded, then reached over Michael's shoulder to open the box and quietly hand Bucky the rosary that had been waiting over seventy years from him. After a barely noticeable hesitation, Bucky wrapped his fingers around the delicate beads, kissing the crucifix before draping the rosary around his neck where it could entangle with his dog tags.


End file.
